Man is our contemporary.

May 21. 

The existence of man in nature is the divinest and most startling of all facts. Man, the crowning fact, the god we know.

It is a fact few have realized.

The standing miracle to man is man.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 21, 1851

Only that thought and that expression are good which are musical.

***

I think that we are not commonly aware that man is our contemporary, — that in this strange, outlandish world, so barren, so prosaic, fit not to live in but merely to pass through, that even here so divine a creature as man does actually live. 

Man, the crowning fact, the god we know. 

While the earth supports so rare an inhabitant, there is somewhat to cheer us. 

Who shall say that there is no God, if there is a just man. 

It is only within a year that it has occurred to me that there is such a being actually existing on the globe. 

Now that I perceive that it is so, many questions assume a new aspect. 

We have not only the idea and vision of the divine ourselves, but we have brothers, it seems, who have this idea also. 

Methinks my neighbor is better than I, and his thought is better than mine. 

There is a representative of the divinity on earth, of [whom] all things fair and noble are to be expected. 

We have the material of heaven here. 

I think that the standing miracle to man is man. 

Behind the paling yonder, come rain or shine, hope or doubt, there dwells a man, an actual being who can sympathize with our sublimest thoughts.

The revelations of nature are infinitely glorious and cheering, hinting to us of a remote future, of possibilities untold; but startlingly near to us some day we find a fellow-man. . . .

From nature we turn astonished to this near but supernatural fact. 

I think that the existence of man in nature is the divinest and most startling of all facts. 

It is a fact which few have realized. 

I can go to my neighbors and meet on ground as elevated as we could expect to meet upon if we were now in heaven. . . . 

I do not think that man can understand the importance of man's existence, its bearing on the other phenomena of life, until it shall become a remembrance to him the survivor that such a being or such a race once existed on the earth. 

Imagine yourself alone in the world, a musing, wondering, reflecting spirit, lost in thought, and imagine thereafter the creation of man— man made in the image of God!


***

You have a wild savage in you, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as yours.